page_title: Madeleine Castaing
section_title: Debuts
hierarchical_section_title: Madeleine Castaing / Debuts
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Madeleine Castaing Artist: Chaim Soutine (French (born Lithuania), Smilovitchi 1893–1943 Paris) Date: ca. 1929 Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 39 3/8 × 28 3/4 in. (100 × 73 cm) Classification: Paintings Credit Line: Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876-1967), 1967 Soutine met the successful Parisian interior decorator and antiquarian Madeleine Castaing (1894-1992) in 1920. She and her husband became one of the artist's most important patrons during the following decade. The portrait took six sittings in the artist's Paris studio. Castaing's fidgeting hands, awkwardly positioned legs, and tense facial expression convey her impatience and discomfort while posing.
context_page_description: Madeleine Castaing was a French antiques dealer and interior designer of international renown. She was the friend and the sponsor of many artists, including Soutine, who made her portrait in 1928. Original, even whimsical, she revolutionized the world of decoration, creating the style Castaing which is now a reference.
context_section_description: The daughter of an engineer who built the train station in Chartres, Madeleine Magistry early married an heir from Toulouse, the art critic Marcellin Castaing. Their very romantic meeting had been concluded by her "kidnapping"; she was barely fifteen or sixteen at the time. Twenty years older than she was, Marcellin Castaing was known for his impressive literary and artistic culture. During the fifty years of their marriage, he remained his wife's great love, according to all the couple's friends, including the writer and photographer François-Marie Banier, who remembers "Madeleine's legendary love for her husband".
  In the 1920s, Madeleine Castaing made her débuts as an actress in silent films; then gave up the career while being already nicknamed "the French Mary Pickford".
  At that time, her husband had offered her a neoclassical manor that she had been longing for, in Lèves, not far from Chartres, where he wanted for her to "unwind", he explained. The young woman had indeed discovered her own vocation for interior design.
caption: Portrait of Madeleine Castaing by Chaim Soutine, ca. 1929, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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